March 23, 2010

It is breathtaking in its simplistic, groveling and ill-informed treatment of the world’s next superpower.

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Do we really believe that what the Naisbitts call “Chinese country music” will soon become a “moneymaking machine” simply because one peasant group’s original composition, Song of Sanitation Workers got some favorable notice in the provincial press?

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This is a country where dissidents disappear and where the legal system can be twisted. Yet China’s brutally efficient machinery of repression and state capitalism is, in the Naisbitts’ gushing parlance, “a new form of governance and development, never before seen in modern history.” Really? Is an autocracy grimly determined to keep itself in power all that unique?

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Ultimately, the one place this book should do well is China itself. The country’s leaders will hardly believe their good fortune at so totally blindsiding the authors, and the ever growing ranks of nationalists will lap up the endorsements of such a famous American commentator as John Naisbitt. But for everyone else, China’s Megatrends is puzzling and shameful reading.

The Discussion: 16 Comments

1 By Kam Leung

I did not think much of Naisbitt’s book when I first read it, and decades later, I doubt if many of the trends he predicted came true. (Anyone remember any one of those Megatrends?) He made a score by coining “Megatrend”. Adding his wife to it, in China would not make him more prophetic.

1) This is a China blog. Were this a Brazil blog, then it would no doubt be all over the various problems of Brazil.

2) This actual post is not criticising China, but criticising the version of it portrayed in this book.

3) History is no reason not to criticise anything, it is only a reason to recognise the causes of what you are criticising. The fact that, for example, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland followed centuries of sectarian violence conducted by both catholics and protestants, is no reason not to criticise any single instance of violence. Yet, on your logic, we cannot criticse anything because history does not allow us to. Your point only makes sense if you consider all countries in the world to be blameworthy except for one.

4) The same “bad news from China is US propaganda” meme that has been pushed for god knows how long. It hardly seems worth pointing out that any visitor to China can gather, off his own bat and without necessarily being influenced by US ‘propaganda’ plenty of stories of CCP wrongdoing of their own.

5) The smeering of people critical of the Chinese government as ‘closet sinophobes’, basically implying that they are all closet racists, when in fact a good number of the are simply saying what many people born and raised in China themselves say.

@Merp – So you think that just because I didn’t write about any of the problems of Brazil, which any reasonably educated westerner could tell you about (deforestation, land reform, criminal gangs – watch City of God, corruption etc. etc.) this means I have a world-view in which . . . . well, you didn’t actually bother to say what the world view consists of, so I guess I’m free to make any wild-assed assumption I like, no?

@Slim – Damn, that was probably the worst load of paranoid, passive-aggressive dreck that I have read in quite a long time. I know Richard has been a booster/critic of Cunningham in the past, but here’s where I simply label the guy “fruit cake” and walk on. He couldn’t even get his Shakespeare quote down right.

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A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing to Taipei and finally back to Beijing for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him…